Hands-on Review: Palm Treo 680

The Treo, in its various incarnations, has long been one of the coolest smart phones on the block. But lately, it's started to look positively obese, with the Treo 700 series weighing a whopping 6.4 ounces, substantially heftier than slim models like the Motorola Q, which weighs in at just 4 ounces. Well, Palm finally figured out that fat and bloated just don't cut it in today's slimmed-down gadget environment, so it's given us the Treo 680, a Palm OS-based handset that trims down the 700p to a more manageable size.

Is it enough? At 5.4 ounces, the 680 is still one of the heavier smart phones on the market, but design-wise it's quite an improvement over its big brother. The weight loss is immediately noticeable in the hand, which makes holding the 680 at ear level much more palatable. What's been trimmed to lose that weight? Primarily the Treo's stubby antenna, famous for painfully jabbing people when the device rode in a front pocket, and not much else. Losing the antenna doesn't make the 680 sound any better or worse than the 700 during calls, and reception seems just fine without the stub. The battery is also smaller on the 680, though this impacts talk time by shaving off only about half an hour. (It's spec'ed at 4 hours.) Curiously, the 680 is also available in a variety of colors.

The big changes are under the hood: Palm positions the 680 as a smart phone for people who may not otherwise consider a PDA phone, pricing it at $199 with service plan or $399 for an unlocked phone you can use on any GSM carrier. (The 700p is $299 with service plan, for comparison.) But it's the 680's unfortunate limitations that may upset that entry-level market the most. The biggie is the loss of the 1.3-megapixel camera. The 680 has a crummy 0.3-megapixel model that is positively dated. Though it has an SD slot, that slot won't support the Palm Wi-Fi expansion card, and the 680 doesn't support 3G wireless networks either. The best you can do is surf the web with EDGE service, which isn't all that great. Internal memory is stripped from 128MB to 64MB as well (though I did not notice much, if any, performance degradation).

Otherwise the devices are very similar: The keyboard is identical as near as I can tell, and the screen is the same size and resolution (320 x 320 pixels). The operating system is the same, Palm OS 5.4.9, and nearly the same quality bundle of software (including the very useful Documents to Go) comes with the unit.

Is it worth $199 when the Q can be had for half that? It's the least expensive Palm-based smart phone on the market now, and frankly I prefer the Palm OS to Windows Mobile by a good margin. It's a good handset but not a great one. The 680's limitations trouble me quite a bit, and $100 is a reasonable price to pay for the additional features offered by its big brother, the 700p. If push came to shove and I had to choose between the two, I'd stick with the 700p and just suck up the thigh-jabbing antenna stub and arm-deadening weight.